Day: 02/14/2015

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How ubiquitous is Monsanto’s RoundUp herbicide, really? Researchers have discovered that a chemical in the world’s most used herbicide – RoundUp – is tainting the world’s food supply at large. It was recently found that this chemical, known as glyphosate, is present concerning amounts in honey and soy sauce.

For the study, researchers from Abraxis LLC and Boston University purchased sample sizes of various foods to analyze levels of glyphosate. Bought from the Philadelphia, US metropolitan area, the following foods were analyzed:

69 samples of honey
26 samples of pancake and corn syrup
28 samples of soy sauce
11 samples of soy milk
20 samples of tofu
The minimum limit of quantification (LOQ) of the method were determined for honey, pancake syrup, and corn syrup to be 15 ppb; soy sauce, soy milk, and tofu 75 ppb. What this means is that products could have contained minimal levels of glyphosate even though they turned up negative.

While glyphosate residues above the limit weren’t detected in the soy milk, pancake and corn syrup, and tofu, shocking residues were found in the honey. Of the 69 honey samples tested, 41 of them (59%) had glyphosate concentrations above the method LOQ (15 ppb), with a concentration range between 17 and 163 ppb and a mean of 64 ppb.
And it wasn’t just commercial honey that was tainted; 5 of the 11 samples of organic honey contained high levels of glyphosate – with a range of 26 to 93 ppb and a mean of 50 ppb.

“This sad news shows just how widespread glyphosate is in our food. With the increase in GM crops being cultivated worldwide it is becoming increasingly difficult to avoid. If you ask anyone if they feel there should be ‘allowed’ levels of toxic chemicals such as glyphosate in their bodies the answer will of course always be ‘No’. It is a fact that the scientific and regulatory process cannot evidence ‘safe’ levels for these chemicals.”
Sustainable Pulse notes:

“The results showed that honey from countries that permit GM crops contained far more glyphosate than honey from countries which limit or prohibit the cultivation of GM crops, with the levels in the U.S. by far the highest.”
honey_glyphosate_chart
Approximately 1 billion pounds of pesticides are sprayed on crops in the United States alone every single year, with much of it containing glyphosate. Regulators as well as Monsanto claim that this ingredient is excreted from the body, but numerous studies have shown that not only is it causing numerous health problems, but it is showing up in urine samples, blood samples, and even breast milk.

Despite testing for hundreds of pesticides in food commodities, the USDA does not test for glyphosate residues. Why?

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A new study, which followed nearly 1 million people over 10 years, concludes that smoking is even deadlier than we thought, accounting for more than 60,000 additional deaths per year and five additional diseases.

Appearing in the New England Journal of Medicine, the study found that smoking was linked to significantly increased risks of infection, kidney disease, intestinal disease (caused by inadequate blood flow), and heart and lung ailments not previously attributed to tobacco.

“Analyzing deaths among the participants from 2000 to 2011, the researchers found that, compared with people who had never smoked, smokers were about twice as likely to die from infections, kidney disease, respiratory ailments not previously linked to tobacco, and hypertensive heart disease, in which high blood pressure leads to heart failure. Smokers were also six times more likely to die from a rare illness caused by insufficient blood flow to the intestines.”

Public health campaigners reacted to the study by saying that even though many disastrous consequences of smoking are well-documented, it’s essential to let the public know that there is yet more bad news.

Bill Novelli, CEO of the American Association for Retired Persons, explained to Big Think that smoking is especially pernicious because its health effects come late in life though most smokers become addicted while they are young and feeling indestructible. Novelli advocates for greater federal oversight:

“Tobacco is the only product, which, if you use as directed, it kills you. And of course 80% of all those who become addicted to tobacco become addicted as kids. And so we have … a national obligation to protect our children. And that’s why the line should be sharper for tobacco than for other products. That’s why we need FDA oversight over tobacco. We need taxes on top of tobacco. We need public education campaigns. And we need to really rein in the tobacco industry.”

Other observations made by the study confirm that quitting is always a worthwhile goal: the longer one smokes, the worse the health effects become, and the sooner one quits, the more quickly the body will begin to recover. Still, there is little to be done presently until someone is determined to quit on their own initiative.

Because the poor and undereducated are more likely to smoke, public health professionals recommend a more robust anti-smoking campaign for those who depend on Medicaid. From the government’s perspective, this would also constitute a substantial preventative care measure, potentially saving billions of dollars in health care costs.

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Alfred ‘Alfie’ Date is 109-years-old and the oldest person in Australia

He began knitting in 1932 when his nephew was born

Alfie has been knitting for over 80 years and likes to lend his talents

In 2013 he began knitting for Phillip Island penguins affected by an oil spill

The penguins can be poisoned if they try to clean the oil off their feathers

He said he makes sure his jumpers are up to scratch, despite his age

Being Australia’s oldest person hasn’t slowed down Alfie Date, who launched a knitting mission just twelve hours after arriving at his new retirement home to provide jumpers for penguins in need.

Alfred ‘Alfie’ Date is 109 years old, and began knitting in 1932 when his sister-in-law taught him how to knit a jumper for his newborn nephew.

Now, Alfie is putting his generous and still-nimble fingers to good use, creating tiny clothes for Phillip Island Penguins who needed woolen jumpers in the wake of an oil spill which prevented the creatures from staying dry, 9Stories reported.

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Alfie Date is Australia’s oldest man at 109-years-old, and spends his spare time knitting jumpers for penguins

Phillip Island’s Penguin Foundation put out a call for keen knitters to create the little jumpers in March last year, to help prevent penguins from swallowing the oil when they attempted to clean themselves.

The same day that Alfie arrived at his new aged-care village in Umina, on the Central Coast of NSW, he decided to offer up the skills he had polished over more than 80 years.

‘I think I’d been in here about 12 hours, might have been 13. The two girls (nurses) come in to me and say “We believe you can knit”, Alfie sai.

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Atoms forming a tentative bond, a moment captured for the first time in experiments with an X-ray laser at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. The reactants are a carbon monoxide molecule, left, made of a carbon atom (black) and an oxygen atom (red), and a single atom of oxygen, just to the right of it. They are attached to the surface of a ruthenium catalyst, which holds them close to each other so they can react more easily. When hit with an optical laser pulse, the reactants vibrate and bump into each other, and the carbon atom forms a transitional bond with the lone oxygen, center. The resulting carbon dioxide molecule detaches and floats away, upper right. The Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) X-ray laser probed the reaction as it proceeded and allowed the movie to be created. Credit: SLAC National Accelerator LaboratoryScientists have used an X-ray laser at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory to get the first glimpse of the transition state where two atoms begin to form a weak bond on the way to becoming a molecule.

This fundamental advance, reported Feb. 12 in Science Express and long thought impossible, will have a profound impact on the understanding of how chemical reactions take place and on efforts to design reactions that generate energy, create new products and fertilize crops more efficiently.

“This is the very core of all chemistry. It’s what we consider a Holy Grail, because it controls chemical reactivity,” said Anders Nilsson, a professor at the SLAC/Stanford SUNCAT Center for Interface Science and Catalysis and at Stockholm University who led the research. “But because so few molecules inhabit this transition state at any given moment, no one thought we’d ever be able to see it.”

Bright, Fast Laser Pulses Achieve the Impossible

The experiments took place at SLAC’s Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS), a DOE Office of Science User Facility. Its brilliant, strobe-like X-ray laser pulses are short enough to illuminate atoms and molecules and fast enough to watch chemical reactions unfold in a way never possible before.

Researchers used LCLS to study the same reaction that neutralizes carbon monoxide (CO) from car exhaust in a catalytic converter. The reaction takes place on the surface of a catalyst, which grabs CO and oxygen atoms and holds them next to each other so they pair up more easily to form carbon dioxide.

In the SLAC experiments, researchers attached CO and oxygen atoms to the surface of a ruthenium catalyst and got reactions going with a pulse from an optical laser. The pulse heated the catalyst to 2,000 kelvins – more than 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit – and set the attached chemicals vibrating, greatly increasing the chance that they would knock into each other and connect.

The team was able to observe this process with X-ray laser pulses from LCLS, which detected changes in the arrangement of the atoms’ electrons – subtle signs of bond formation – that occurred in mere femtoseconds, or quadrillionths of a second.

“First the oxygen atoms get activated, and a little later the carbon monoxide gets activated,” Nilsson said. “They start to vibrate, move around a little bit. Then, after about a trillionth of a second, they start to collide and form these transition states.”

‘Rolling Marbles Uphill’

The researchers were surprised to see so many of the reactants enter the transition state – and equally surprised to discover that only a small fraction of them go on to form stable carbon dioxide. The rest break apart again.

“It’s as if you are rolling marbles up a hill, and most of the marbles that make it to the top roll back down again,” Nilsson said. “What we are seeing is that many attempts are made, but very few reactions continue to the final product. We have a lot to do to understand in detail what we have seen here.”

Theory played a key role in the experiments, allowing the team to predict what would happen and get a good idea of what to look for. “This is a super-interesting avenue for theoretical chemists. It’s going to open up a completely new field,” said report co-author Frank Abild-Pedersen of SLAC and SUNCAT.

A team led by Associate Professor Henrik Öström at Stockholm University did initial studies of how to trigger the reactions with the optical laser. Theoretical spectra were computed under the leadership of Stockholm Professor Lars G.M. Pettersson, a longtime collaborator with Nilsson.

Preliminary experiments at SLAC’s Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource (SSRL), another DOE Office of Science User Facility, also proved crucial. Led by SSRL’s Hirohito Ogasawara and SUNCAT’s Jerry LaRue, they measured the characteristics of the chemical reactants with an intense X-ray beam so researchers would be sure to identify everything correctly at the LCLS, where beam time is much more scarce. “Without SSRL this would not have worked,” Nilsson said.

The team is already starting to measure transition states in other catalytic reactions that generate chemicals important to industry.

“This is extremely important, as it provides insight into the scientific basis for rules that allow us to design new catalysts,” said SUNCAT Director and co-author Jens N&ostroke;rskov.

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Erectile dysfunction drug could protect the liver from damage caused by sepsis

Erectile dysfunction drugs could prove useful for other conditions

Tumour necrosis factor (TNF) is involved in the pathophysiology of sepsis and TNF is thus a promising therapeutic target in human sepsis trials. Research into the molecular mechanisms underlying sepsis has unexpectedly suggested that an existing class of drugs used to treat erectile dysfunction (ED) may be beneficial[1].

By studying a mouse model of sepsis, researchers at the University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, discovered that administering sildenafil, a phosphodiesterase-5 inhibitor, caused the liver to produce more cyclic GMP, which in turn reduced TNF signalling in hepatocytes and prevented liver damage.

“Sildenafil and other ED drugs might be a good approach to try early in the course of the illness to forestall organ damage,” says Timothy Billiar, the study’s senior author.

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A team of scientists has reveal one of the deepest and darkest secrets of the Earth. The scientists have found out that the Earth’s inner core has an inner core of its own. It is so-called “inner-inner core”. Surprisingly it has properties which can reveal information about our planet Earth.

According to the scientists the inner-inner core is small, smaller than the moon and has astounding features which can tell how our planet has formed, its history and other processes of the Earth.

The inner core of the Earth was once considered to be the solid iron ball. The scientists have revealed an inner-inner core which is half the diameter of the whole inner core.

The scientists state that the iron crystals in the outer layer of the inner core are positioned north-south, whereas they are pointed roughly east-west in the inner-inner core. Also the iron crystals in the inner-inner core behave differently from their counterparts in the outer-inner core, which means that the inner-inner core could be made up of different types of crystals.

A new study adds at least five diseases and 60,000 deaths a year to the toll taken by tobacco in the United States. Before the study, smoking was already blamed for nearly half a million deaths a year in this country from 21 diseases, including 12 types of cancer.

The new findings are based on health data from nearly a million people who were followed for 10 years. In addition to the well-known hazards of lung cancer, artery disease, heart attacks, chronic lung disease and stroke, the researchers found that smoking was linked to significantly increased risks of infection, kidney disease, intestinal disease caused by inadequate blood flow, and heart and lung ailments not previously attributed to tobacco.

Even though people are already barraged with messages about the dangers of smoking, researchers say it is important to let the public know that there is yet more bad news.

Researchers have found that smoking is linked to significantly increased risks of infection, kidney disease, intestinal disease, and heart and lung ailments not previously attributed to tobacco.

“The smoking epidemic is still ongoing, and there is a need to evaluate how smoking is hurting us as a society, to support clinicians and policy making in public health,” said Brian D. Carter, an epidemiologist at the American Cancer Society and the first author of an article about the study, which appears in The New England Journal of Medicine. “It’s not a done story.”

In an editorial accompanying the article, Dr. Graham A. Colditz, from Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, said the new findings showed that officials in the United States had substantially underestimated the effect smoking has on public health. He said smokers, particularly those who depend on Medicaid, had not been receiving enough help to quit.

About 42 million Americans smoke — 15 percent of women and 21 percent of men — according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Research has shown that their death rates are two to three times higher than those of people who have never smoked, and that on average, they die more than a decade before nonsmokers. Smokers are more than 20 times as likely as nonsmokers to die of lung cancer. Poor people and those with less formal education are the most likely to smoke.

Mr. Carter said he had been inspired to dig deeper into the causes of death in smokers after taking an initial look at data from five large health surveys being conducted by other researchers. The participants were 421,378 men and 532,651 women 55 and older, including nearly 89,000 current smokers.

As expected, death rates were higher among the smokers. But diseases known to be caused by tobacco accounted for only 83 percent of the excess deaths in people who smoked.

“I thought, ‘Wow, that’s really low,’ ” Mr. Carter said. “We have this huge cohort. Let’s get into the weeds, cast a wide net and see what is killing smokers that we don’t already know.”

The research was paid for by the American Cancer Society, and Mr. Carter worked with scientists from four universities and the National Cancer Institute.

The study was observational, meaning that it looked at people’s habits, like smoking, and noted statistical correlations between their behavior and their health. Correlation does not prove a cause-and-effect relationship, so this kind of research is not considered as strong as experiments in which participants are assigned at random to treatments or placebos and then compared. But people cannot ethically be instructed to smoke for a study, so a lot of the data on smoking’s effects on people comes from observational studies.

Analyzing deaths among the participants from 2000 to 2011, the researchers found that, compared with people who had never smoked, smokers were about twice as likely to die from infections, kidney disease, respiratory ailments not previously linked to tobacco, and hypertensive heart disease, in which high blood pressureleads to heart failure. Smokers were also six times more likely to die from a rare illness caused by insufficient blood flow to the intestines.

Mr. Carter said he had confidence in the findings because, biologically, it made sense that those conditions were related to tobacco. Smoking can weaken the immune system, increasing the risk of infection, he said. It is also known to causediabetes, high blood pressure and artery disease, all of which can lead to kidney problems. Artery disease can also choke off the blood supply to the intestines. Lung damage from smoke, combined with increased vulnerability to infection, can lead to multiple respiratory illnesses.

Two other observations supported the findings, he said. One was that the more heavily a person smoked, the greater the added risks. The second was that among former smokers, the risks diminished over time. In general, such effects, known as a dose response, suggest that an observed correlation is more than a coincidence.

The study also found small increases in the risks of breast and prostate canceramong smokers. Mr. Carter said those findings were not as strong as the others, adding that additional research could help determine whether there were biological mechanisms that would support a connection.